OpenShot has many great features, such as trimming and arranging videos, adjusting audio levels, transitions between videos, compositing multiple layers of video, chroma-key / green screen effect, and support of most formats and codecs.

What really sets OpenShot apart from other video editors is the easy-to-use user interface. We have worked very hard to create a video editor that everyone can enjoy.

OpenShot provides extensive editing and compositing features, and has been designed as a practical tool for working with high-definition video including HDV and AVCHD .

What's New:

I am so excited about this release, and although it's been in development for a long time, it addresses so many important bugs and improvements! Let's start off with the highlights, and then below is a giant list with more details for those who are interested.

7 New Effects (Crop, Hue, Color Shift, Pixelate, Bars, Wave, Shift)

Each of these new effects could have their own blog posts and tutorials (and probably will soon). Each effect was created from scratch for OpenShot 2.4.2, and are all fully keyframable, and can be combined with each other. This creates millions of interesting possibilities (some combinations are shown in the video above). Animated pixelization boxes, animated cinematic aspect ratios, and so much more! As you can probably tell, I'm really excited about them!

Auto Audio Mixing

When enabled, clips can utilize 3 different audio mixing strategies, for cases when clips are overlapping and competiting for audio volume. For example, a background audio track can automatically lower its volume when an overlapping voice clip needs to play. It is currently disabled by default (on new clips), but can easily be turned on in the clip properties.

Auto Rotate

Photos or videos with rotation metadata will be automatically rotated in OpenShot (requires a somewhat newer version of FFmpeg though). Take a vertical video, or a horizontal photo with your phone, and likely it contains this rotation metadata... and OpenShot will display it correctly.

Improved Audio Playback

Audio playback and mixing has been an area of weakness for OpenShot, and continues to be an area of focus for improvements. Many bug fixes and improvements have been made, and many users will notice less popping, smoother mixing, and less issues in this area. But there is still work which needs to be done, and will continue to be improved further.

Improved Stability

With each release of OpenShot, stability continues to be improved. Most crashes are reported on Windows builds, although we still have too many crashes on all OSes. Some crashes are caused by dependencies, and some are caused by multi-threaded race conditions or memory corruption. Version 2.4.2 for windows is wayyyyy more stable now, and for the first time, is being offered as both a 64 bit and 32 bit version. Many schools still use older 32bit CPUs and have often requested this. Also, our 32-bit builds are now large memory aware, and can support more memory, making crashes much less likely for lower powered computers.

Improved Export Dialog

OpenShot's export dialog now displays progress in the window title, including some performance metrics (encoding frames per second and estimated completion time).

New Codec Support (including experimental)

AAC is now the default audio codec for many presets, which allows OpenShot to create videos which are more widely compatible with all OSes, devices, and web browsers. Also, experimental codecs supported by FFmpeg and LibAV can be used in OpenShot for the first time.

Growing Team of Developers

I am so proud of the volunteers who have been contributing their time to OpenShot over the past many months. Team OpenShot has slowly been gaining more contributors on GitHub, and our users have been so helpful in reporting bugs, updating GitHub tickets, and providing steps to help us reproduce issues. We are still struggling to keep up with the number of GitHub issues, and are trying our best to keep them grouped, de-duped, and organized by priorities. We could still use some help in this area, if anyone is interested!

Dramatically Improved Build System

OpenShot has migrated its build system to GitLab, and moved our development flow to GitFlow. We now have a world-class build system, new installers for every branch and every commit, integration with GitHub, LaunchPad, Slack, and openshot.org. This has been empowering our contributors to create custom branches with experimental features, and out pops 4 installers (Linux, Mac, Windows x86, Windows x64). We have a total of 6 servers now contributing to our builds, git synchronization, status checks, unit tests, and installers.